Download Record

Author

Date

Metadata

Abstract

Traditionally, the US military has sought and
achieved asymmetric military advantage, i.e. delivered
tactical blows, quickly, in the right places. However, lately,
non-state terrorists have seized the asymmetric advantage.
They use cutting edge Commercial-Off-the-Shelf
Information Technology (COTS IT) for agile Command,
Control, Communications, Computer and Intelligence
(C4I). US Military, by contrast, is hamstrung by brittle,
archaic MILSPEC C3I kit, and by a crushing bureaucracy
that resists refreshing the technology at anything
approaching Internet speeds. Members of the US Naval
Intelligence have voluntarily reached across stovepipes to
re-establish tactical asymmetric advantage, through Rapid
Evolutionary Acquisition (REA) of game-changing IT. It’s
not about the technology per se; it’s about using IT to give
warfighters “information high ground.” Accordingly,
REA adapts best practices from success cases in
government and industry. Meanwhile, Congress has
demanded DoD fix its broken IT acquisition processes.
This REA initiative serves as an exemplar.

Description

Chris Gunderson is a Research Associate at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is the principal investigator of the Open Enterprise Information System (OEIS) research initiative. This project sponsored by the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and executed in the Northern Virginia. The project objective is to help the government improve its flawed information technology acquisition process through four key activities: Establish a collaborative network of government, industry, and academic experts who have succeeded at some aspect of OEIS; Study Internet successful stories and distill the lessons learned; Embed lessons learned into familiar government acquisition artifacts; Work with early adopting pilot projects to verify, validate, refine, and document best practices

10 Years After: the 9/11 Essays. Homeland Security Affairs (HSA) is pleased to present this special collection of essays in remembrance of the ten-year anniversary of September 11, 2001. We chose to honor those who lost ...

Software development and acquisition have been the Achilles' heel within the Departtnent of Defense for many years. In spite of considerable oversight and the control exercised by many regulations standards, there still ...